WooThemes Hustle HomePage Slider: if you go to: Slide > Hustle Settings > Slide Backround, and check “Use the “Featured Image” as a slide background instead of as the slide’s media” then you get the larger, nicer slider image you see here. But you get the grey bar at the bottom of the image even if you don’t have any text. Is there a way to remove this bar?

Sphinx

Mythical creature with the body of a lion and a human head. Treacherous and merciless. Those who cannot answer its riddle suffer a fate such as being eaten by this ravenous monster. Unlike the Greek sphinx which was a woman, the Egyptian sphinx is typically shown as a man (an androsphinx). In addition, the Egyptian sphinx was viewed as benevolent, but having a ferocious strength similar to the malevolent Greek version and both were thought of as guardians often flanking the entrances to temples.

In European decorative art the sphinx enjoyed a major revival during the Renaissance. Sphinges are generally associated with architectural structures such as royal tombs or religious temples. The oldest known sphinx was found near Gobekli Tepe and was dated to 9,500 BCE.

The largest and most famous sphinx is the Great Sphinx of Giza, situated at the Giza Plateau adjacent to the Great Pyramids of Giza on the west bank of the Nile River and facing due east (29°58′31″N 31°08′15″E). The sphinx is located to the east of and below the pyramids. Although the date of its construction is uncertain, the head of the Great Sphinx now is believed to be that of the pharaoh Khafra. What names their builders gave to these statues is not known.

Sphinges @MU

(yes, “sphinges” is the plural of “sphinx”) Are there Sphinges at MU? Of course their are! How many? Where? This is your quest!

If you accept this challenge, please find 1 or more Sphinges on the MU campus, take a photo and upload to flickr, including the “GPS Coordinates!” (hint: if you use the flickr upload in Firestorm or the SL Viewer, it’ll do the “GPS Coordinates” (SLurl) automatically for you) Then paste a link to your photo in the comments below.

Thank you so much for your lovely letter. I’m excited to hear that you’re making your services and products even better, since I already thought they were great. GoDaddy was the first domain registrar I ever used. I’ve always appreciated the ease, speed, and simplicity of GoDaddy. Recently I’ve been in the position of having to work with a couple of your competitors. While I always thought that you did a great job, I also imagined that probably most people did.

I guess absence really does make the heart grow fonder. While I’ve loved working with GoDaddy, the unexpected nightmare of working with your competition informed me that apparently great GoDaddy service is not so easy to achieve. Or at least there are a couple of corporations out there that are every bit as bad as GoDaddy is good. Maybe because you’re so successful, I’ve heard the occasional grumble that your products are somehow inferior. That hasn’t been my experience. I’ve registered 20 domain names with you. I’m sure that’s tiny compared to anyone who’s active. But it’s also 19 more than I ever expected to register. Time after time, setup and changes have been ridiculously fast and easy.

But.

Much as I love your products and services. I hate your ideology. It makes me ill to think that even the few dollars of my account are going to help you build a world I don’t want to live in. I find your advertising offensive to women, and your politics destructive to independent web developers.

I own a Tissot T-Race, Danica Patrick watch. It makes me happy when I wear it. Instead of humiliating her, Tissot is able to sell their products by honoring her achievements.

Danica Patrick is an extraordinary driver. Any man alive would be lucky to have her track record. And in a field that’s never been too strong with women competitors, her achievements will stand for a long time. So I think it’s great that she’s been a spokesperson for GoDaddy. What an awesome choice. Unfortunately I find the misogynistic commercials you’ve put her in degrading to women. They’re childish. They’re insulting. They treat us as objects rather than real people. Perhaps you have a huge audience out there of macho guys who have loved those commercials. IDK. All I can tell you for myself is that every dollar you spend on advertising makes me hate you even more.

I’m still in shock about your stand on SOPA / PIPA. I know at the last minute user pressure made you reverse your position. But that doesn’t absolve you. I see you as being allied with old, 20th century media factories and against the creativity of the 21st century. I was truly shocked by this. I thought the developers of the open web were your customers. I don’t understand how a non-neutral net benefits you, but I’m sure it hurts your customers. Or maybe you get so much money from big media that you don’t have to care about people who only register 20, or 200, or 2, domain names. Your stand against creativity and for the old media urge to lock down culture and stifle innovation wounded me deeply. I still think about it every day. I’ll probably never forgive you for it. I’ll certainly never forget.

So there it is.

You have a great service and I know it. I really want to walk away from GoDaddy, but I probably won’t. Every time I register another domain name with GoDaddy I hate myself for supporting your objectifying, anti-creativity values.

Hi Guys! Greetings from Taipei! It’s time for our July Haiku Speedbuild and I thought we’d try a little variation this month. Since we have people around the globe, it seems like every time slot is bad for someone. Also, it seems like peeps like casual, unstructured building time. So this month we’ll have Haiku Speedbuild from Noon Saturday to Noon Sunday. You just come by at the time that’s best for you. I’ll be in and out for the 24 hours, but if you miss me you can do “Self Service Speedbuild.” We’ll have 4 poems by White Dog Bobby on the wall. You can “buy” the one you like for L$0 and place it by your building pad and then have fun. It’d also be great if you’d make a second plaque and put your name on it so visitors can see who the builder was. To rez at LEA11 you join the VB Friends Group. Once you’re done building you can keep the group or leave it as you like. You can join it off my profile groups, or with the link below:

If anyone’s in the mood to do one and then come back and do another, that’s cool too. If we use up all the building pads I’ll put more out.

July will be our 4th and final Haiku Speedbuild at LEA11. When Cyanide Seelowe et al founded the VAA & Haiku Speedbuild 6 years ago, it was originally held at a Zen retreat. For most of the time since then it’s been held at Peri Afarensis’ Afar sim which, after so many years of generosity to VAA and others, she recently closed. We’ve been at Vaneeesa Blaylock’s “Alice in Cornelland” project at LEA11 for a short while now, and in August we’ll be moving to another exciting new home.

This week we’re at the just announced LEA11 (Linden Endowment for the Arts) project Alice in Cornelland. Haiku Speedbuild is lucky to be the first event at this new education / exploration region searching for a “virtual haptic.” Our March poems are from Beth Griffenhagen’s book Haiku for the Single Girl, and this week they’re read for us by 16-year-old slam poet & photographer Hanna Lee Reehl!

Haiku Speedbuild #1 – Afar, 3 March ’13

today’s Haiku Speedbuild poems were from Haiku for the Single Girl by Beth Griffenhagen

Huntress Catteno picked:

In my neighborhood
Even the homeless woman
Has a boyfriend. Sigh.

Huntress Catteno

Mia Wallace & Dr. Wiggles collaborated on:

I like trysts with guys
From other countries. It’s like
Stamping your passport!

Mia Wallace & Dr. Wiggles

Corcosman Voom worked with:

I am convinced that
All available men are
Somehow damaged goods.

Corcosman Voom

Corcosman Voom’s finished sculpture

Today was my first day hosting Haiku Speedbuild and we were fortunate to have Miso Susanowa come out and give us a little “Prim Twisting” demo for the first part of the hour. Thank you Miso! And of course, thank you Peri Afarensis for all your help and support!

Giant world map at David Rumsey’s Map Island in Second Life. The red pushpins are the home cities of visitors to the installation. Near the bottom is London, the city where I currently attend university, and near the top is me, standing on Taipei, the city where I was born, yet have never lived in.

It’s crazy to think that peeps thought that the internet would be the end of serendipity. That the magic of flipping through pages in an encyclopaedia or books on shop shelves would be lost. Yeah. Wut? I’ve got so much serendipity blowin’ out my ass it’s practically impossible to actually finish anything!

1. Maybe I should sign the sites I manage up at Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Go through verification steps.
3. Google wants a sitemap.
4. Google doesn’t like your lameass “html” sitemap, it wants a real “xml” one!
5. Find and install Sitemap plugin.
6. Plugin says: you should announce your new sitemap.xml with a new blog post
7. Xue is pathologically incapable of doing a blog post without snapping a new pix to go with it.
8. Look for suitable location.
9. Get sucked into David Rumsey’s incredible cartography sim.
10. Oh gawd, now it’s going to be cartography serendipity day. Hope I get back to webmaster tools eventually!

Anyway, maybe I’ll do a separate post on Rumsey’s amazing sim later in the day, but for now, here it is:

As I posted recently, all wordpress blogs I’m involved with have been seeing lots of spam: Comment Spam, User Registration Spam, and Login Hacks. Here’s a log from the Stop Spammer WordPress plugin showing the last hour of login attempts at the iRez blog. As you can see it’s a lot of “weak” lowercase passwords applied against the “admin” account (which, fortunately, doesn’t even exist)

Stop Spammer

In my recent “Delete Your Admin Account” post, I noted the steady stream of login attemts, most often against the username “Admin” on numerous WordPress blogs that I’m involved with. The highest traffic, and hence the most spamified of these blogs is iRez, and so I recently installed the “Stop Spammer” plugin there.

I’ve been seeing many different types of spam in high frequency:
• Attempts to login as Admin, or Root, etc
• Spam User Registrations
• Spam Comments

The comment and trackback spam is to get links to whatever site a person or bot is promoting. The login hacks, well who knows what mayhem that might lead to. The Spam User Registrations are kind of puzzling as I don’t see what they could accomplish. At least the blogs I’m involved with, you don’t have to be a “user” to leave a comment, so the spam registration isn’t required to leave a spam comment, and registration as a “Subscriber-level user” doesn’t come with any sort of power on the blog. I haven’t been able to dig up a “Why?” for this, so the temporary answer is simply that bots are made to crawl and stick their bot-fingers in every crack they find and so they do.

The Stop Spammer plugin works on many different issues, (read the documentation) and as you can see in the printout above, we have a steady stream of, I presume, bot login attacks, that listing just from an hour.

Twitter Password Security

Can you believe it, I’ve seen FOUR different Twitter accounts hacked in the past 3 weeks! All had “weak” passwords (short, all lowercase) and luckily the damage was only some bogus posts, nothing too terrible and the passwords weren’t changed thereby stealing the account from the owner. Still, a hijacking is pretty creepy.

Agent Xue examining a body at the Chaos City SIM in Second Life. It’s easy to look hot in Jackie Graves “Poison” paramilitary uniform, but as the poor corpse reminds us, it’s all fun and games till some creeper hacks your account and then Twitter Password Security isn’t so funny anymore!

When you’re logged in to your laptop at school and you walk away to get a creamy chai mate or to pee or whatever and your friends jump on your laptop and start sending bogus insult messages to all your Facebook friends, well, that might be funny, but when netbots with unknown intentions are compromising lots of Twitter accounts, it’s really time to step up your password.

I don’t believe any of these accounts were phished, I think it was just bots cracking simple passwords. Believe me I know complex passwords are a pain, and having a different password for every account is a nightmare, but none of those precautions seem like such a big deal when you wind up with “Internet STD’s.” A few years ago the net was a fun sandbox and the creepy guy in the trench coat didn’t really even come by that often… those days are gone. Face the facts: the sandbox is surrounded by creepy guys in trench coats now. We can still play, we can still build awesome sandcastles, but you’re going to have to finally break down and get a real password.

6 lowercase characters that were probably your former pets name just don’t seem to cut it anymore. Yes, you’re going to have to do the upper, lower, number, special character thing. Instead of the old reliable “fluffy” or “princess” or “psychogirlfriend” how about a phrase you know, that you can take a letter or two for each word from – that generates a string that’s actually easy for you to remember, but a lot less hackable than “fluffy”. But remember that even a “good” password can still be phished, and it’d be great if that didn’t compromise ALL your accounts. A unique password for each account is so much to remember, but what about splitting the difference? Take your acronymISH base and add a piece for the specific website, so if your phrase is:remember, remember, the fifth of November

then your Twitter password might be:re,REM!t5Ntwtr

A bot won’t crack that so fast, if it’s ever phished you might not lose all your other accounts, and yet it’s easy for you to remember.

DISCLAIMER:

I’m way not any sort of security expert, nor a Twitter Security specialist, and since it’s pretty important stuff, as always, see a professional! This is just some info that might be useful as observed from my little mini-trench in the field.

WordPress Security

I’ve been seeing a lot of bot login attempts on a number of different WordPress installs lately. Almost always (but not exclusively) they’re attempts to login to the account “admin”. There’s a pretty good chance you have a user with this name since WordPress often creates one when you initially do the install.

I got to wear a sexy paramilitary uniform in this summer’s performance of VB41 – Rock the Casbah, who knew that a few months later I’d be giving WordPress Security tips! (WordPress security is definitely harder than virtual base jumping!

So if you have the user “admin” and maybe a weak password, you could be ripe for break-in. I don’t actually know what the bots would do with your site if they got in, but it’s a safe bet they’re not trying to deposit cash in your bank account.

My advice: delete your “admin” account. Of course you need 1 or more “admin-instrator” level users, but none of them need that username. It might actually take you a minute to do this, since if you created the WordPress Install, you may well haveUSER:adminEMAIL:my.self@something.comPASS:hopefullyNotSomethingReallyShort&allLowercase

This means that you won’t be able to create a new user account with your my.self@something.com email since it’s already in use. So if that’s your primary email, you’ll have to create a new admin-level user with a different email, then delete the “Admin” admin-level user, and THEN you can makeUSER:meeeeeEMAIL:my.self@something.com

It’s a little bit of a nuissance, but we’ve all seen peeps, maybe ourselves, crying about data on a crashed hard drive, and thought, hmm, I guess backing up really isn’t that much hassle. Deleting a user named “admin” isn’t going to solve everything in the world, but it’s a pretty easy step to help diffuse a real and current problem. Shout if I can help or say anything more on it!

DISCLAIMER:

I’m way not any sort of security expert, nor a WordPress Security specialist, and since it’s pretty important stuff, as always, see a professional! This is just some info that might be useful as observed from my little mini-trench in the field.
Good Luck! Play Safe! But still Adventurous!